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Intel is in the process of ramping up its next generation of flash SSD drives, as all new products are based on 34 nm MLC flash (X25-M for consumers).
The X25-E drives should also be receiving an upgrade with the die-shrunk flash memory chips soon. Nevertheless, we kept the same drive lineup that we had used for the initial story: 16 X25-E enterprise-class flash SSDs from Intel with a capacity of 64 GB each. The total capacity of a fully-configured array with these 16 drives is exactly 1 TB, but capacity wasn’t our objective here. Rather, we wanted more throughput and better I/O performance.
The Intel X25 SSDs are all based on an in-house design with a 10-channel flash controller and integrated 16 MB cache memory. They have Native Command Queuing (NCQ) support, allowing the drives to optimize performance, manage wear leveling, and counter performance-degrading effects such as write amplification. In short, the SSDs continually optimize storage to maximize the user experience at all times.
None of the SSDs currently available support Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 600 MB/s transfer speeds, and it appears that a faster interface isn’t necessary--at least not yet. The drives we used are sufficient to reach 3GB/s+ throughput in RAID, but we believe they cannot actually saturate the new generation HBAs and RAID controllers utilizing PCI Express 2.0 and SAS/600.
- X25-E Extreme 64GB...
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Holy cow, how much for the total damage?
It would be good to get a benchmark with a Windows XP/Vista/7 showing how long to boot the OS, various games, file copy speed... etc Fair enough these give fast throughput but where are the real world results?
What about some photos of the raid itself?
That's... such an overkill...
Personally, I would like to see a "Part II" to this article showing RAID 5, 6 and 10 setups with the same tests. No database admin or graphic designer, animator or CAD/CAM/GIS professional is going to use RAID 0 with it's inherent vulnerability, or at least they shouldn't.
It would be good to get a benchmark with a Windows XP/Vista/7 showing how long to boot the OS, various games, file copy speed... etc Fair enough these give fast throughput but where are the real world results?
I think with the cost of such a setup these would be ideal for a web or application server, or maybe a small data center. Booting Win 7 would be the least of your problems.
what vga was used?
I wonder if this is the type of storage used in super computers or render farms ?
"None of the SSDs currently available support Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 600 MB/s transfer speeds"
False: STEC's Zeus IOPs, and BitMicro's E-Disk Altima support SAS (Zeus supports SAS 6 Gbit). Though these cost about 3-5x more pr GB.
could it be that the computer's integrated graphics card is also connected to that bus and utilizes some bandwidth?
Another question I had is if you really notice a difference running whatever program on 2,2GB/s or 3,4GB/s? Even slow Vista should fly there.
Excellent article, thanks
I don't know about anyone else, but I would like to see Tom's including more pictures of the hardware actually in the Tom's office, set up, and being used in some of the articles that get posted.
So what you need now is for Intel to hook you up with another 6 drives and you can load up the onboard SATA controller, raid 0 that with the others. Or switch platforms to something designed for Quad SLI then really load up on the drives (plus onboard SATA of course.) I say dial up the ridiculous, then see how long it takes to boot/load games. New hobby for the super overclockers, make fastest raid 0 setup.
I'd like to see the actual setup myself, as well..
id love to see this myself as well...
It would be good to get a benchmark with a Windows XP/Vista/7 showing how long to boot the OS, various games, file copy speed... etc Fair enough these give fast throughput but where are the real world results?
As I've said before, it's not all a hardware RAID and thus isn't bootable.
I would love to see some high end Mobo's that incororate these new controllers to leave your PCIe slots free. I would bet it would not be cheap but it certainly would be awesome!
16x Intel X-25 E will set you down approx €10.000
16x Intel X-25 E will set you down approx €10.000
16x Intel X-25 E will set you down approx €10.000